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OPINION

Opinion: Working to feed your family isn't selfish

People gather to protest the handling of the pandemic by Governor Mike DeWine and Dr. Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health, at the Butler County Courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio on Saturday, May 9, 2020. Free Ohio Now protests happened simultaneously across the state.
(Photo: Meg Vogel/ The Enquirer)

He criticized, in strong terms, those who would "reopen" the state to business, and he praised Gov. Mike DeWine and his state health director Dr. Amy Acton for being hesitant to allow a full reopening.

Mooney stated that DeWine and Acton, have been "guided by science to save lives," while a "loud minority" of reopen fanatics are taking a "live and let die" approach.

He also accused those who favor reopening sooner rather than later of not caring about racial minorities, poor people and old people, since they have been disproportionately felled by the disease.

Strangely, he compared the debate over COVID-19 to the Vietnam War. He pointed out that more Americans have died of the coronavirus than died in Vietnam.

So?

More Americans have died on our nation’s highways over the past 20 years than will ever die of the coronavirus.

Of course if we lowered the speed limit on I-71 from 65 to 30 mph, there would be a lot fewer fatal crashes. I have no doubt that Mooney, wanting to save lives, would support such a measure. But a "loud majority" of Ohioans would not.

Cutting the speed limit in half would invite mass civil disobedience. It’s dangerous enough to adhere to today’s speed limits with people whizzing by you going 80 mph.

Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo justified some of his shutdown measures saying, "If it saves one life…" it’s worth it. No one in their right mind, believes such things. If they did, left-turns and swimming pools would be banned in America. And without the economic blowback.

But back to Mooney’s Vietnam analogizing. I don’t recall in the midst of that war virtually every small business in America being shut down by government edict.

In WWII, even during the Blitz, when London was being bombed by the Nazis almost every night, businesses were not shut down and life went bravely on. In fact, shutting down businesses during that war would have been suicidal. No country in the world has ever done what we are doing today to combat a virus. Past practice has been to quarantine the infected and those at high risk and for the rest of us to get on with our lives as best we can. And, most importantly, to keep working.

It is only through work and a growing economy that money for hospitals and health care workers and teachers and cops and politicians can be raised. Shut down a nation’s economy, put 21 million people out of work and you are putting plenty of other lives at risk.

People gather to protest the handling of the pandemic by Governor Mike DeWine and Dr. Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health, at the Butler County Courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio on Saturday, May 9, 2020. Free Ohio Now protests happened simultaneously across the state.
(Photo: Meg Vogel/ The Enquirer)

Mooney says we should be "guided by science" on when to reopen.

OK. What science? Which scientists? For there is a growing number who not only question the wisdom of keeping a lockdown in place, but the value of the long lockdown in the first place.

They include Stanford biologist Michael Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, both Stanford professors of medicine, University of Southern California professor of pharmacy and health economics Joel Hay and Neeraj Sood, a USC health economist. There are many more lockdown skeptics whose credentials are at least as impressive as Acton’s and DeWine’s.

Originally, the lockdowns were meant to "bend the curve" of the disease. That’s what we were all told. Space out the number of infections so that hospitals would not be overrun with cases. And that worked. But it wasn’t good enough for the government lockdown advocates. They moved the goal posts to the finding of a vaccine, which is not even on the horizon.

Mooney asserts that like Vietnam, COVID-19 has disproportionately taken the lives of "older, blacker, browner and poorer." Well, certainly older. Some 80% of COVID-19 fatalities are 65 or older. The vast majority have significant and life-threatening co-morbidities.

And so it should have been no surprise to New York state officials when they mandated nursing homes in the state to accept COVID-19 patients that they were putting thousands of non-infected nursing home clients at risk.

Nursing home administrators begged state health bureaucrats to reconsider. They didn’t. And thousands died.

And Mooney calls lockdown skeptics who believe that it’s time for government to take its foot off the necks of America’s small businesspeople, "just plain selfish."

That’s what a Texas judge called salon owner Shelley Luther for opening her shop before her state shutdown was lifted. She could’ve avoided jail if she apologized to the court and admitted she’d been "selfish."

She politely declined.

As she told the judge, working to feed her kids is not selfish. And it wasn’t selfish for the stylists she employed to work to feed their kids either.

Mooney, it seems, would side with the Texas judge who put Luther in jail, as he begs his fellow Ohioans to suffer the "inconvenience" of this shutdown "for just a tad longer."

But how long is a "tad." A week? A month? A year? Mooney doesn’t say.

No doubt more people will get and will die from this disease in the weeks and months to come. The lockdown skeptics believe the government-ordered shutdowns aren’t preventing deaths but merely postponing them. And at the cost of trillions and trillions of dollars.